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Here we go again.A
report issued Thursday by the new Director General of the U.N. International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano, has injected new
adrenalin into those arguing that Iran is developing a nuclear
weapon.

The usual suspects are hyping--and distorting--thin-gruel
language in the report to "prove" that Iran is hard at work on a nuclear
weapon.The New York Times' David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, for
example, highlighted a sentence about "alleged activities related to nuclear
explosives," which Amano says he wants to discuss with Iran.

Amano's report said:

"Addressing these
issues is important for clarifying the Agency's concerns about these activities
and those described above, which seem to have continued beyond 2004."

Sanger and Broad play up the "beyond 2004" language as
"contradicting the American intelligence assessment"that concluded that work on
a bomb was suspended at the end of 2003."Other media have picked that up and run with it, apparently without
bothering to read the IAEA report itself.

The Times article
is, at best, disingenuous in claiming:

"The report cited new
evidence, much of it collected in recent weeks, that appeared to paint a
picture of a concerted drive in Iran
toward a weapons capability."

As far as I can tell, the "new evidence" consists of the
"same-old, same-old" allegations and inferences already reported in the open
press--material that failed to convince the Director of Intelligence, Dennis
Blair, to depart from previous assessments during his Congressional testimony
on February 2.Rather, he adhered
closely to the unanimous conclusions of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies
expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of Nov. 2007.

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So What's New?The
Director General of the IAEA, for one thing.

Yukiya Amano found huge shoes to fill when he took over from
the widely respected Mohamed ElBaradei on December 1.ElBaradei had the courage to call a spade a
spade and, when necessary, a forgery a forgery--like the documents alleging that
Iraq had sought yellowcake
uranium in Niger.

ElBaradei took a perverse--if diplomatic--delight in giving
the lie to spurious allegations and became persona
non grata to the Bush/Cheney administration.So much so that, in an unsuccessful campaign
to deny him a third four-year term as Director General, the administration
called in many diplomatic chits in 2005--the same year he won the Nobel Peace
Prize.

In addition to a strong spine, Elbaradei had credentials
that would simply not quit.His
extensive diplomatic experience together with a PhD in international law from New York University, gave him a gravitas that
enabled him to lead the IAEA effectively.

Gravitas Needed

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Lacking gravitas, one bends more easily.It is a fair assumption that Amano will prove
more malleable than his predecessor--and surely more naÃ¯ve.How he handles the controversy generated by
Thursday's report should show whether he means to follow ElBaradei's example or
the more customary "flexible" example so common among U.N. bureaucrats.

Press reports over the past few days--as well as past
experience--strongly suggest that the "new evidence" cited by the Times may have
comes from the usual suspects--agenda-laden sources, like Israeli intelligence.

On Saturday, the Jerusalem
Post quoted the Israeli government as saying the IAEA report "establishes
that the agency has a lot of trustworthy information about the past and present
activities that testify to the military tendencies of the Iranian
program."The newspaper cited the IAEA
report as suggesting that "Teheran had either resumed such work [on a nuclear
weapon] or had never stopped when U.S. intelligence said it did."

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). His (more...)